London: The Biography полностью

Drink, sex and gambling once always consorted together. They were the trinity of London vice and weakness, an unholy threesome which disported happily across the city. They represented recklessness and defiance, in the face of an uncertain life in a city bedevilled by insecurity.

All the commercial and financial institutions of London were established upon a giant gamble, so why not participate in the same perilous but enthralling game? Your encounter with a prostitute might lead to a fatal disease, but a turn of the dice might make you wealthy; then, in the face of all these hazards and difficulties, you might drink to forget. The social historian of eighteenth-century London, M. Dorothy George, noted that the “temptations to drink and gamble were interwoven with the fabric of society to an astonishing extent, and they did undoubtedly combine with the uncertainties of life and trade to produce that sense of instability, of liability to sudden ruin.” Many men of business were ruined by dissipation and gambling-Industry and Idleness, charting the decline of a London apprentice through drink, dice and women to eventual hanging at Tyburn, was a characteristic London story.

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The first evidence of gambling in London can be adduced from the Roman period, with the excavation of dice carved out of bone or jet. The unexpected turns of life, as then experienced, are also revealed in the elaborate equipment of a fortune-teller found beneath Newgate Street. In the early medieval period Hazard was played in taverns and other low houses, together with another dice game known as Tables. In medieval brothels, too, gambling and drinking were part of the service. Quarrels over a game were sometimes fatal and, after one round of Tables, “the loser fatally stabbed the winner on the way home.” There was plentiful scope for fraud, also, and there are reports of the gaming boards being marked and the dice loaded. Yet the passion for gaming was everywhere. An excavation in Duke’s Place revealed “a piece of medieval roof-tile shaped into a gaming counter,” according to a report in The London Archaeologist, and as early as the thirteenth century there were rules in Westminster for the punishment of any schoolboy found with dice in his possession. A stroke of the rod was delivered for every “pip” on the dice.

Playing cards were imported into London in the fifteenth century, and their use became so widespread that in 1495 Henry VII “forebad their use to servants and apprentices except during the Christmas holidays.” Stow records that “From All hallows Eve to the day following Candlemas-day there was, among other sports, playing at cards, for counters, nails and points, in every house.” They were found in every tavern, too: packs of cards had the names of various inns imprinted upon them. Their merits were widely advertised. “Spanish cards lately brought from Vigo. Being pleasant to the eye by their curious colours and quite different from ours may be had at 1/- [one shilling] a pack at Mrs. Baldwin’s in Warwick Lane.” The business in cards became so brisk that the tax upon their sale is estimated to have furnished in the mid-seventeenth century an annual income of five thousand pounds which meant that “some 4.8 million packs of cards” must have been traded.

Fulham earned a reputation as early as the sixteenth century for its dubious traffic in dice and counters; it is evoked by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where

For gourd and fullam holds

And “high” and “low” beguile the rich and poor.

A fullam in this context was a loaded die. Another recognised centre for gambling was Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Here boys “gambled for farthings and oranges”; one popular game was the Wheel of Fortune with a movable hand spinning within a circle of figures, “the prize being gingerbread nuts the size of a farthing.” These gaming fields of course attracted dissolute Londoners. Lincoln’s Inn Fields was the recognised harbour for “idle and vicious vagrants” known collectively as its Mummers. Among them were Dicers and Chetors and Foists who specialised in gambling. Dice were carved out of true so that they seemed “good and square, yet in the forehead longer on the cater and tray than the other.”

“What shifts have they to bring this false die in and out?”

“A jolly fine shift that properly is called foisting.”